Exploring the Asynchronous of the Frequency Spectra of GAN-Generated Facial Images

The rapid progression of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has raised a concern of their misuses for malicious purposes, especially in creating fake face images. Although many proposed methods succeed in detecting GAN-based synthetic images, they are still limited by the need for large quantities of the training fake image dataset, and challenges for the detector’s generalizability to unknown facial images. In this paper, we propose a new approach that explores the asynchronous frequency spectra of color channels, which is simple but effective for training both unsupervised and supervised learning models to distinguish GAN-based synthetic images. We further investigate the transferability of a training model that learns from our suggested features in one source domain and validates on another target domains with prior knowledge of the features’ distribution. Our experimental results show that the discrepancy of spectra in the frequency domain is a practical artifact to effectively detect various types of GAN-based generated images.